The UK’s chief inspector of schools, Sir Michael Wilshaw, has said that the low performance of some of the country’s brightest pupils at state secondary schools is “an issue of national concern.”
Wilshaw’s comments follow the publishing of a new survey by the Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted), “The most able students: are they doing as well as they should in our non-selective secondary schools?”. The survey, based on field visits to 41 schools, claims that a significant number of the country’s most able children are underperforming.
Wilshaw said that the most academically-able students arrived from primary school “bright-eyed and bushy-tailed”, but that things started “to go wrong very early”.
“They tread water. They mark time. They do stuff they’ve already done in primary school,” he said. “They find work too easy and they are not being sufficiently challenged.”
According to the report, there is a significant drop in the grades of many previously high-attaining children once they reach GCSE level. In the schools reviewed by Ofsted, 62% of pupils who got top marks in their English SATs failed to perform likewise in their English GCSE. 53% of pupils dropped in the same way in Maths.
Wilshaw said that school league tables were partly to blame. He said they created “false incentives” for teachers in their emphasis that all students attain a GCSE C-grade. As a result many neglect to nurture the talents of their very brightest students.
Russell Hobby, general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers, welcomed the report.
“The government’s league table culture deserves a measure of the blame”, he agreed. “For too long, schools have been forced into the middle ground, to get students over thresholds at the expense of both the most and least able.”
But the teachers’ union NASUWT criticised the report, saying that it was “based on the flimsiest of research evidence.”
“Yet again the teaching profession and parents will be deeply dismayed to see another ideological report condemning our education system,” said its leader, Chris Keates.
